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The Board of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has formally approved Almaty as a candidate city bidding to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Norway’s Oslo and China’s Beijing are the other two candidates competing for the right to host the Games, Tengrinews reports citing Vesti.kz.
However, Almaty is considered an outsider in the race, even though it was earlier reported that Almaty was a clear favorite in the competition to host the 2022 Olympics and needed only two additional facilities built for the Games.
Almaty received the lowest scores from the IOC work group in a majority of the evaluation categories, according to Championat.com. Besides, Kazakhstan has almost no experience in hosting big winter sports competitions.
Nevertheless, even in case Almaty does not succeed in winning the bid to host the Olympics, it will derive several benefits from participating in the race and hosting other events. Almaty will host the Winter Universiade in 2017. It is also going to qualify for the Biathlon World Championship. For these purposes, the city is planning to reconstruct the high-mountain skating rink Medeu, build a modern ski and biathlon complex and a number of other facilities that will serve the development of sports in the country.
The final choice of the IOC will be announced next summer in Malaysia.
By Dinara Urazova
